Bahrain Airport Services Co. (BAS) has selected air transport IT specialist, SITA, to automate staff rostering and allocation at Bahrain International Airport in a new five-year deal. SITA’s resource management system will help the ground handler achieve its objective by increasing the efficiency and productivity of its airport staff.

Salman Saleh Al-Mahmeed, Acting Chief Executive Officer, Bahrain Airport Services, said: “SITA has helped us completely transform and automate our ground handling process. We now have a powerful, real-time planning tool, which gives us the intelligence to schedule and dispatch our all our employees at the airport and make sure we have the right people, in the right place, at the right time in a constantly changing environment.”

SITA is providing BAS with a complete end-to-end solution that connects employees on the move and their mobile devices with back office systems. This ensures the ground handler can make decisions as needs change for more effective use of resources. For example if there are many aircraft arriving simultaneously, they can allocate more employees to certain tasks to improve efficiency.

Hani El-Assaad, SITA President, Middle East, India and Africa, said: “SITA’s resource management system gives Bahrain Airport Services a robust and completely automated planning solution, which they can use to accelerate decision making and deploy resources quickly based on changing needs. In fact, it is one of the key pillars of SITA’s ‘Intelligent Airport’ program, which enables airports and their stakeholders to track, manage and share real-time information to enhance both airport processes and the passenger journey.

“Almost every airport and airline in the world does business with SITA. They are supported 24/7 by our global team of IT professionals, more than half of which are based on-site at airports. It is this unrivalled presence at more than 1,000 of the world's airports which makes SITA the ideal technology partner.”

Bahrain International Airport, a key hub for the Middle East, serves more than seven million passengers annually. More than 26 airlines fly to and from the airport, which plans to triple its capacity by 2030. To support this growth, in 2006 the airport announced a US $300 million (BD 113 million) airport modernization and expansion program.